Photos

This is a shot of the Queen Elizabeth 2 moored to the Overseas Passenger Terminal. The lights to the left are the Sydney central business district (CBD). Members of TE can view the large post for a better appreciation of this ship.

This was the last visit of this Queen to Sydney. It has been in operation since 1967, and is heading off to a well deserved rest, to serve as a floating hotel in Dubai. It will be appreciated there.

Planning for this shot was pretty basic. I formed this image, in my mind, back when I posted the shot for “Waiting for a Ship to Come In”. I had decided back then that I wanted a similar position as a comparison. Then it was a question as to whether I wanted a night shot or not. I decided to go with the HDR night shot, to give it a bit more of a “majestic” look. The first shot was kind of a lonely shot of the terminal, pretty quiet, even for the middle of the day. You can’t see the terminal in this view, it is totally dwarfed by the ship. I do provide another shot of the terminal, along with a close side view of the ship in a workshop.

Workflow was as follows:
The picture you see here is an HDR Merge of 4 separate shots, all taken as Raw at 22 mm, ISO 400, F8 for 1, 2, 4, and 8 seconds respectively. This ranged in exposure from -2 to +1. There is still one bright light on the left (from the sign for the Four Seasons Hotel).
This was initially posted as a Photoshop HDR, the small version still is.

Following a critique from Stephane Le Gal (Stepan), which suggested that it might be “a little blurry”, I went back and looked at it, with a more critical eye. He was right, on the periphery of the shot, it could be better. I went back and reexamined each of the shots and all were shot at 22 mm, yet the first one, shot at 8 seconds seemed just a little bit larger than the others when they were all laid one on top of the next. I don’t quite understand this, but in any case, I decided to redo the large post, with a manual HDR. This involved laying one shot on top of the next and masking and or decreasing the opacity to keep what I wanted from each layer, and to drill down to the lower layers. It’s a laborious job, but you do have a lot more control. Once I had this done, to my now better satisfaction, then I continued with the collection of 4 shots as if they were one with my normal workflow. Incidentally the shot that was a little larger than the others, was used only to pick up some colour and light from the water.

Levels – midpoints set by eye.
Curves – used auto, then cut the software recommendations in half, adjusted RGB for contrast
Overlay layer used with soft 5-10% opacity black and white brush to be used for dodging and burning.
Saturation - +20 to master, -10 to yellow and green
Saved as a tiff.
Cropped, resized, merged the original layers, selected and reduced noise in sky, duplicated the layer and did some incremental and specific sharpening with a layer mask (70% opacity black brush), framed and saved as a jpeg for the large post
Stepped back to the tiff, re-cropped then repeated the resizing, merging, noise reduction, sharpening, and framing for the save as the smaller post